


All the Best Deceptions

by sallyapostrophes



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Drinking, HIV/AIDS Crisis, HP Pop Punk Fest 2021, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M, Minor Pansy Parkinson/Blaise Zabini, Pansy Parkinson is a Good Friend, Queer History, Trapped In Elevator, brief mentions of sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-15
Updated: 2021-03-15
Packaged: 2021-03-23 17:27:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30058992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sallyapostrophes/pseuds/sallyapostrophes
Summary: Draco leaves the continent to get away from him, but even thousands of miles away, he manages not to get very far.
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter
Comments: 1
Kudos: 27
Collections: HP Pop Punk Fest 2021





	All the Best Deceptions

**Author's Note:**

> This is basically a love note to Dashboard Confessional and all the nights my Limewire CD and I spent roaming around the city and my feelings, back in the days of my youth. 
> 
> Special thanks to mywinonas AKA cat, who betaed this and gave me the encouragement to actually post it- you are awesome, my friend <3
> 
> Any remaining mistakes are mine.

He found the CD stuffed under the passenger seat of the beat-up Honda Accord of the bloke he’d fucked for half the semester he spent studying abroad at UCLA. It was a Muggle uni, but Granger had told him it had a great reputation for an American school, and he hadn’t cared much about the actual study so much as getting the outright fuck out of Wizarding Britain. Jason… Jason? Jacob? Whatever his name was… Draco hadn’t cared much about him either, only his green eyes and dark, shaggy hair, and the way his black lashes laid against his cheeks when he rested his eyes, and the way his lips quirked up at the corners when he was trying not to smile. It was all just a little bit too familiar for Draco to admit the congruences, even inside his own head. He’d slide the CD into a little slot in the center of the dash and turn the volume up as loud as it would go, and Jason would wail along with every song on the mornings they cut class to ride down to the beach and drink cheap, canned beer on the shorefront. It was the only souvenir he kept from the trip, except for the memories of the cool breeze, and the cool nights, and the cool guys that he spent them with. 

He'd jammed it into scuffed-up Discman that Ginny Weasley had given him. She’d gone along, too, and he’d been rather put out to discover that he didn’t hate her nearly as much as he thought he should have on all the nights that she looped her arm through his and they walked, stumbling, down past the commons and through the quad, out into the city proper, to climb up the old fire stairs, the bolts screaming in their beds of rust. It was an absolute fucking miracle, nothing short of an act of divine intervention, that had kept their shaking hands steady as they stumbled, laughing, up to the hot, tarry roof. She’d laid out flat on the blacktop and told him, with tears in her pretty green eyes, about the way it was, years ago- the way people like them were treated like animals, like monsters. The way a few cases of a wasting disease had turned into a violent pandemic, the way the doctors knew and didn’t care, the way no one would touch them. The way they died at home on their floors. The way the loves they left behind had taken their ashes, in helpless grief, and thrown them over the fence onto the White House lawn, so they could spend the rest of their shiftless eternity haunting the people who failed them, over and over, for decades.

Unlike Draco, she had been serious, her Art History major turning into just History when she learned about the way the world had turned on them as easy scapegoats when the AIDS crisis started hitting too close to home. He’d laid his head on the hard plane of her belly and listened to the stories rumble up from the center of her, and he’d thought maybe he was even in love with her a few times before he realized it was only the green of her eyes he was seeing when she talked about them. Her queer champions, the ones who came before, the heroes of the Stonewall Riots and the Gay Liberation Front. But it wasn’t the obvious, insurmountable bravery of the gay community that bled and died to tear out a life for themselves; no, it was the little words she used, like “we” and “us” when she told him the stories. It was how she used the plural, like she knew something about him that he didn’t know, and it was the way he could never bring himself to correct her, that drove him into the back seat and into the shitty, stick-and-poke tattoos of whatever the fuck his name was, with the lips and the teeth and the green eyes that weren’t quite the right shade.

And he hadn’t missed the bloke when he stepped through the Floo the first night back in London, and he hadn’t missed him when his mother pressed a cool kiss to the side of his cheek and asked him, pointedly, if he and Ginny were seeing each other now, because wouldn’t it be a lovely gesture to be seen with her, a war hero, and wouldn’t it be lovely to show them all how the Malfoy family had changed? He hadn’t missed him when he Flooed through to Pansy’s flat without owling first and found her bent over the arm of her chaise sofa, Blaise Zabini buried to the hilt inside her, just like they were back at Hogwarts- really, they weren’t fooling anyone with their great display of promiscuity; they may have gone around fucking other people, but it was so disgustingly obvious that they only wanted to fuck each other he almost couldn’t stand to look at them, except for he loved them so much he wanted to choke. 

He didn’t even miss him on the night his third week back when Ginny dragged him to a pub with what was probably all of Gryffindor House, and she punched her brother Ronald in the face for drawing his wand when Draco stepped through the door. But when Potter looked up- Potter, with his fucking eyes that were just the right bottle green, that Draco remembered why he’d wanted to leave the continent in the first place- then, Draco missed him. He’d have done anything to be on his knees in the shared loo of a four-way dorm, or pressed up against the wall of one of those awful American bars where lonely straight men went to slowly die, or bent over in the back seat of a car older than he was. But Ginny had pulled him down onto her lap, and she was whispering in his ear about how hot he looked in a pair of old, ripped jeans and a shirt he found on the floor of his dorm and worn home, whispering about how much she missed their rooftop and about how she wanted to go flying him and how he’d better give a toast at her wedding, because that was a thing, now- she’d finally caught on to what Luna Lovegood had known all along.  
So, he did the only reasonable thing to do, which was to get so piss-drunk that he’d had to lean against her to walk just like all those nights back in California. And when she helped him into the Floo, he couldn’t stand the idea of the yawning halls of the manor, and his mother, whose refusal to admit how obviously fucking gay he was grew more palpable by the day. So, he Flooed to Pansy’s again, only Blaise had gone, and she was in bed, and it was too quiet, even with the sound of the cars speeding through the streets and the odd wisps of conversation floating in through the open window from the folks wandering home as the pubs closed.

And he pulled the old Discman out of the pocket of his hoodie and slipped the little bugs in his ears, stretching out on the sofa with his shoes still on in sheer spite of Pansy, who’d dared to be in bed asleep on the first night since yesterday that he’d spent thinking about Potter. It had only taken being drunk in the same room with him to realize that all those years of animosity had really been a brilliant dance where nobody leads at all, and he was measuring his minutes by a clock that’s blinking eights.

“Well, this is incredible,” he sang, pushing the little volume key until the bugs were loud enough to drown the thoughts of Potter out. “STARVING, INSATIABLE, YES THIS IS LOVE FOR THE FIRST TIME…”

“Draco, what the actual fuck?”

Pansy staggered through her bedroom doorway, her hair rumpled, her thin silk chemise hanging on her shoulder by one thin strap. She was so, so beautiful, and he loved her even when he was sober, but he was still drunk enough to tell her that out loud, and the way the angry slant of her brows softened into something exasperated and fond burned like an ember in his heart.

“So this is odd,” he hummed.

“Yes,” she replied. “It is.”

She stretched out bodily on top of him, and he wrapped his arms around her and buried his face in her long, dark hair, and breathed in the smell of Blaise’s orange-and-clove cologne. 

“And the picture frames are facing down, and the ringing from this empty sound, is deafening and keeping me from sleep,” he sang.

“Draco,” she mumbled into his chest, “the only thing keeping anyone from sleep is you.”

When he woke to the sound of her tea kettle shrieking away on a stove that was lit by magic, he rolled over, yawned, and regretted it, and Pansy was quite merciless with the freshening charms she slung straight at his face and teeth.

“You look pathetic,” she told him fondly. “And you smell like a brewery. Go home, and shower, and change. Some of us actually have to work, you know- I have three case briefs and a deposition to file, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to endure breakfast in the Ministry canteen alone… it’s an absolute cesspool of desperate, unmarried men.”

“And how is that a problem?”

“Draco, don’t be ridiculous, you know I don’t fuck unmarried men.”

“Except Blaise,” he muttered.

“I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Draco ignored the polished marble of the foyer and the footsteps of the people walking across it and the way the pairs of feet seemed to part around him, like water parting around stone. It was strange, their sidestepping, but he supposed eventually, their memories would fade. When they stopped before the lift and the doors parted with a ‘ding,’ he stepped on and looked up to find Pansy still in the hall, watching him with the vicious sort of smile on her face that he knew, from a lifetime spent with her, meant nothing good. She whipped out her wand and the door whisked shut, and the lift began to ascend. From over his shoulder, he heard a frustrated huff.

“Sorry,” he said, turning to offer the voice an apologetic smile. “She’s sent us to the…”

He trailed off. 

“Top floor?” Potter asked.

“Yes,” he said. 

“Oh,” Potter replied, his brow smoothing, his frown flattening out into something almost… nervous. 

He remembered what Potter looked like gently drunk, head thrown back in laughter at something Weasley said, a smile stretching lazily across his face like it belonged there. He was trapped in an elevator… of all the cliché scenarios she could have come up with, and he had absolutely no doubt that her cold, Slytherin heart had engineered this little twist of fate, why did it have to be a thirty-six square-foot box on the morning after a night he’d spent sweating out alcohol onto a fake-velvet, polyester sofa?

He could feel Potter looking at him, and the inside of his brain scrambled desperately for purchase. He closed his eyes and summoned the memory of the night before, Pansy sleeping curled against his chest, a wet spot forming on his shirt where she’d drooled on his shoulder. He tried to summon up the warm feeling, the way it felt to love her, the weight of all their shared memories resting on his belly.

“So this is odd,” he whispered to himself. “The painful realization that all has gone wrong…”

“Hey… is that Dashboard?” Potter asked.

He looked up, startled.

“And nobody cares at all,” Potter hummed. 

A slow, shy little smile spread across Potter’s face, and that was what did him in; in two strides Draco closed the distance of the childhood between them, seizing a fistful of Potter’s black-and-crimson Auror robes and hauling him in for a kiss that went on for days. And when he pulled away, there were Potter’s wide, bottle-green eyes, blinking in shock. And the elevator dinged open, but he didn’t even have time to turn and look over his shoulder, because Potter had reached a warm, heavy hand around to rest against the back of his neck, and when he leaned in to press another kiss to the corner of Draco’s mouth, he took long enough with it that it made the wizard who’d made the unfortunate decision to step onto the lift with them clear his throat loudly. 

“Alright then, Harry?”

Harry pulled away and smiled.

“Hey, Perce.”

He slipped his hand into Draco’s and gave it a soft little squeeze.

Percy Weasley’s head shook in wry amusement.

“Well, it’s about time you got on with it,” he said.

Harry face reddened a bit, but he just rolled his eyes, tugging Draco along by the hand through the elevator door.

“I’m going to tell Ronnie,” Percy called from behind them. “He owes me five galleons. Oh, and I can tell mum, right? You know what, I don’t even care. I’m telling mum whether you like it or not.”

They parted in front of the long hall that led, Draco knew from the days after the Battle, to the Aurory, and it wasn’t lost on him, the irony of their position- the last time they were here, Potter had been escorting him down that hall at wandpoint. But Potter didn’t seem to be focused on that particular memory, judging by his heavy look as he watched Draco’s lips promise to come along to the pub and meet Ginny and Luna when the day was done. And Pansy, to her credit, made it a full thirty seconds without gloating at the sight of the blush on his cheeks. Draco smiled at her, at the predatory smirk he knew she only used when she was trying to keep from looking fond in public. And not for the first time that morning, the warm feeling rose up in his belly. 

“So that’s how we do things, now,” he asked her. “We just lock people in elevators?”

“Well, darling, you know what they say. Needs must.”

She’d known the whole time, he realized. All those years and all the best deceptions and clever cover stories, and she’d known the whole time.

**Author's Note:**

> Visit me on [Tumblr.](https://sallyapostrophes.tumblr.com/)


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